I’ve had a strange couple of days. Not at all unpleasant, and in fact better than I anticipated and therein lies the clue to the first lesson learned. I should really say lesson reinforced rather than learned as nothing that I have experienced over the past two days is anything new but it has been an opportunity to bring certain things to the forefront of my thinking and with a little self-awareness realise that old habits die-hard.

Lesson 1-The negative vicious circle of depression

Like many others, negative thinking is a real threat to my well-being and general outlook on life. Most of the time I manage to control those demon thoughts and they rebound immediately from my conscious the moment they fly in. A skill I have learned to execute perfectly over the years.  This week however, with a new lap-top scheduled at work, I let all those fears and dreaded predictions of disaster take hold so that I was not looking forward to this morning one bit. My mind was racing with thoughts about the loss of data, scrambling of documents, eradication of my contacts, and having to spend hours on the phone to our in-house Helpline to retrieve it all. I have little patience with IT equipment and gadgets and my philosophy is that if it comes with a manual, it’s too complicated. I want to get-and-go and from listening to others with their new laptops, that wasn’t going to happen. I don’t know whether my subconscious was also working overtime but I was awake and up at 04.00am this morning preparing for battle.

Needless to say, after all this energy and effort spent in worrying about something I had no control over it all went rather well and took much less time than anticipated. I still have all my contacts intact, no email derail, and even Facebook is better! (Ssshhhh!)

So next time you are tempted to look on the black side of everything, see the worst in yourself  or view the future as bleak, don’t.  Challenge those thoughts and put an end to those thinking errors.

You might save yourself a lot of heartache.